Facebook is done. The New York Times has declared an exodus from the popular social networking site started by two enterprising Harvard University students in 2004. "If you ask around, as I did," writes Virginia Heffernan in the New York Times, "you'll find quitters."

Why this disillusioned departure? "It was suddenly clear that Facebook was not just a social club but also an expanding force on the web, beholden to corporate interests," says Heffernan. If this concern doesn't sound familiar, it should.

Consider GeoCities, the online homesteading service which debuted in 1995. When they were purchased by Yahoo in 1999, users bemoaned the new corporate owners, who disbanded a popular community leader programme and declared ownership over anything users posted to their pages. "They wanted our 'community' but they pretty much have altered it and made it into something else … exactly what they told us they would not do," one user explained to CNET.

And quitting an online space because it no longer has cache isn't new either. Friendster, LiveJournal, GeoCities – the list of used-to-be-popular places is endless. Before Facebook became uncool, it was MySpace – launched a year before its rival – that commentators were rushing to declare "over".

However, as social media researcher danah boyd has argued, the question of what social networking tool is cool has less to do with the bells and whistles, and more to do with the usual questions of race and social class. The real difference between MySpace and Facebook? They are nearly tied for unique visitors, but Facebook, which was born at an Ivy League university, has tended to attract whiter, wealthier, more educated users.

But regardless of what cool actually means, the big brother and corporate control concerns are real ones. When corporations own online spaces, users do not always have a say in the ways their online socialising is used. Facebook faced the same uproar as Yahoo when it similarly announced a change to its terms of service this past February, giving it greater control over user-content (it quickly reversed the changes).

The profit being made by these corporations is dependent on user participation – the updating of status messages, the tagging of photos, and the writing on walls. And while those polled by Heffernan are largely concerned about the privacy issues of having their social interactions indexed and archived, the less-noticed threat is that by housing our memories and data in the cloud, we risk loss just as much as we do when we toss the negatives and stick our photos in a box.

This week's Gmail outage – when users lost access to their email for nearly two hours – was yet another reminder that entrusting your data to the internet is no guarantee that you, or anyone else, will always be able to access it.

Nor does it mean that it will always be there. Those irate GeoCities users? If they didn't leave GeoCities back when it was bought out by Yahoo, they're leaving now. Yahoo announced this spring that it is shuttering GeoCities for good.

So is the Facebook exodus real? Who cares. For as long as we've been online, there's been a next big thing. Remember when everyone was buzzing about that new search engine called Google? The real question is whether we'll bother to learn (yet again) the lessons of mixing socialising with corporate-controlled spaces.